I'm not seeing what the big deal is here. Extraction of differential information from video frames has been standard in video editing and compositing software for years. Grab a demo copy of After effects, folks.
Here are some best-of's to peruse before concluding that 'anigbrowl is part of the problem with HN:
* http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1875412 (MIDI)
* http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=995096 (3D film)
* http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4011770 (Google Moog doodle)
* http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1263289 (DV on DSLRs)
A couple suggestions:
* If a downvoted comment with no replies upsets you so much that you feel a need to pile on with a pointed negative comment, go to the bottom of the page, type the commenter's name in, click 'comments', then sort by 'score', and read the top 10 or so first. You may find the urge to pile on dissipates quickly.
* While it certainly isn't going to cause drama here ('anigbrowl being one of the more levelheaded contributors to HN, way more so than me), I think you'll find that comments like yours tend to read as personalizing disputes, and lead to embarrassing spats you'd be better off not attaching yourself to.
Looking back, I think what riled me was the word 'folks'. As in, "nothing to see here, folks", although he didn't actually say that.
"Naively, this sounds like one might (a) compute the translation from one pixel to the next in each frame, and (b) re-render the video with small motions amplified. Unfortunately, such an approach would lead to artificial transitions between amplified and unamplified pixels within a single structure. Most of the steps of motion magnification relate to reliably estimating motions, and to clustering pixels whose motions should be magnified as a group."
The math behind the grouping (recognizing the relevant area as an object, magnifying the motion of the area properly, and filling in the empty space intelligently) is the cool "computer vision" part.
My guess is you might end up with something along the lines of, say, take a specific clip of a guy's face, mask the face, average the color, detect the subtle changes with a script, and use the output of the script to control a color filter. Likewise if I had an existing clip of a particular sleeping baby, I could target the chest, motion track, and feed the tracking data into a filter. But that's a laborious way to fake particular outputs of what this software does in realtime on arbitrary clips of things moving or changing -- it's not nearly equivalent.